Getting paid is a problem for many professional doulas, says Randy Patterson, who set out to change the industry four years ago with her ProDoula startup. In an often-overlooked field, hopeful doulas can have a hard time getting their business up and running, and they tend to begin working for free as a result. Patterson, a doula herself with 20 years of experience, and her ProDoula co-founder, Debbie Aglietti, aim to end the cycle of free labor (pun intended) with ProDoula’s model of setting clients up for success both as doulas and as businesspeople.

Patterson told Parade all about what a doula actually does, how this system of unpaid labor came to be and how ProDoula is breaking the cycle.

What exactly is a doula?

A doula provides physical, educational and emotional support to women during pregnancy, birth and the postpartum periods. But really, when I’m looking someone in the eye and talking about what a doula actually does, we reduce fear and we instill strength. And we do that in a variety of ways, some of which are emotional, some of which are physical and some of which are through education.

How did you become a doula?

My story’s a little weird, I think. When my daughter started kindergarten, I stepped up as the Daisy Scout leader. I spent the whole year focusing on really teaching them about accountability and self-reliance and self-esteem—all things that I think are really important for women to have. Unbeknownst to me, one of the little girls in the troop had a mom who was a midwife. She came to me at the end of the year and she said, “What you are doing for these little girls, you must do for women who are having babies.”

What’s the average pay like for a doula?

One of the problems in our industry is that there are so many women who want to be doulas that they’ll do it for free, and they’re often encouraged to do so by their trainers. When you have doulas telling people they’ll work for free, then people tell their friends, “Find a new doula; she’ll do it for free.” And that, of course, affects other doulas’ ability to charge their worth. As a doula, our role is to contribute to the empowerment of women, and how can we contribute to the empowerment of women at the expense of ourselves as a woman?

There’s a good portion of doulas who charge a substantial fee. Depending on the part of the country, somewhere around $650 to attend a birth, and in larger cities like New York and L.A., the average is probably between $1,000 and $1,500, with some doulas charging very high-dollar amounts and marketing themselves based on their experience.

[As a doula,] I’m going to be on call for you 24 hours a day. Now, I live in the Northeast. That means if there’s a snowstorm, I’ve got to shovel my car out and come to you. It means I can’t go out of town. It means I’m going to miss holidays with my own children; I’m going to miss back-to-school night potentially. My family’s going to make a huge sacrifice for me to do this work. And we need to be compensated for that. I think this work is, for a lot of women, work of the heart. But the downside of that is, if we do this work for free, it makes it a hobby and it makes it only for the privilege.

Why did you decide to launch ProDoula?

My business partner, Debbie, and I were longtime members of another certification organization, which promised us they would teach us how to be doulas—and they never promised us anything more than that. But what we found was that people were becoming doulas and then not knowing what to do next. They weren’t getting a lot of support, and they weren’t getting any instruction on how to find clients. So what was happening was lots of trainers were telling people to work for free. Like, just go to homeless shelters and see if you can support someone in there. Go to a local high school and see if there’s teen pregnancies. It was almost like [they thought] the doula wanted to attend births, rather than they wanted to provide a professional service that people could hire if they chose to.

We were just watching doula after doula take a training and, within a year or two, they were no longer around. We believe that in order to leave birth better than we found it, we need every person who’s passionate about improving birth to continue in this field. And we recognize that the only way that’s going happen is by teaching them sustainable business practices. We would also be, in our trainings, teaching doulas how to build a brand and how to build an LLC and how to manage their finances.

So it’s kind of like a mini-business school combined with the doula certification courses.

Absolutely. People coming into this field may be a stay-at-home mom, or someone who’s retired from working, I don’t know, for the phone company, who never was an entrepreneur. And unfortunately, you can’t just apply for a doula job somewhere, we’re not at that place yet.

So we offer more advanced classes in business, and we offer business consulting, and you can purchase a business plan template for opening a doula business. You can buy doula contracts on our website, so that people coming into this field have some kind of starting point.

Do you think your model is working?

We can see that in the longevity of our membership—people are staying, and people are growing. And the questions people are asking are much more dialed in to the reality of what this work is.

When you finish a doula training, you are so on fire. You are just so inspired. At the end of it, you’re like, “Coach, put me in! I’m ready!” And then you go back to the reality of your own life and there’s no one calling you like, “Hey, by the way, are you a doula?” So a week passes, and a month passes, and three months pass, and you never actually got to be a doula.

People are leaving our training with ideas like, OK, I can build a website, and all I have to do is go to my state’s website to start my LLC—that sounds reasonable. I can do that.

Is there an ordinary day in the life of a doula?

You never know what’s going to happen. You may start out the day thinking you’re going to do a little work on your website, work on your search engine optimization so that local families can find you, and you’re gonna return some emails for potential clients. Maybe you have a prenatal appointment scheduled where you’re going to meet with an existing client—and the phone rings, and you have a client who needs you to come because she’s in labor. And off you go.

Everything else just kind of waits, and at the same time you’re navigating who’s going to pick up your kids off the bus that day and is anybody going to eat a meal at your house that night and are you gonna be back from this birth in time for your husband to get up and go to work in the morning? So there’s a lot of things to navigate when that happens, but you may not have that happen that day, and get a lot of stuff done.

When I was just working as a doula, not the owner of this organization, if I was cooking, I was cooking two meals and freezing one. If I was working, it was nose to the grindstone because I could get plucked out of my own life at a moment’s notice and become part of someone else’s life for an unlimited amount of time.

What’s your ideal day at work?

Every opportunity I have to inspire or empower another woman when I’m working—it could be a phone call with a client who is fearful about a particular thing, and I’m able to talk her down from that and allow her to feel those feelings and help her come up with some tangible ideas for how we’re going to get around those things in labor.

And on this end, as the CEO of ProDoula, I get to be around doulas all day. So my favorite part of my day is talking to other doulas and helping them navigate difficult situations or just hearing them talk about a situation that they navigated beautifully.

What’s your best advice for aspiring doulas?

If I have one mantra for women, it’s charge your worth. I think women discount what they bring to the table. You know, we do all these crazy things to sabotage our ability to generate revenue. And we need to generate revenue so we can stand on our own.

How much revenue are you generating? Tell us about your salary below for a chance to be featured in Parade‘s annual What People Earn issue.

AMG/Parade Digital

Connect With Us

More from AMG/Parade

Our partners

Your use of this website constitutes and manifests your acceptance
of our User Agreement,
Privacy Policy,
Cookie Notification,
and awareness of the California Privacy Rights.
Pursuant to U.S. Copyright law, as well as other applicable federal
and state laws, the content on this website may not be reproduced,
distributed, displayed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used,
without the prior, express, and written permission of Athlon Media Group.
Ad Choices